Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously wounded in a shooting on January 8, 20011 at a constituent event in Tuscon, announced yesterday that she was resigning her seat in Congress to focus more fully on her recovery.

Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who became a symbol of Americans’ hope and resilience as she tenaciously recovered from a gunshot wound to the head over the past year, announced Sunday that she is resigning from Congress this week.

. . . .

“I have more work to do on my recovery,” the Democratic congresswoman says in the video. “I’m getting better. Every day my spirit is high,” she says, speaking directly, deliberately and somewhat haltingly. “I will return, and we will work together for Arizona.”

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As Rep. Giffords departs Congress, you can check out her legislative legacy on Westlaw using the following resources:

Floor speeches she made are available in the Congressional Record (Database ID: CR)

Search:  SP(Giffords) (189 docs)

The bill tracking for legislation she authored or sponsored during her time in Congress can be found in the Historical Bill Tracking database (billtrk-old).

Search:  au(giffords) & ci(federal) (60 docs)

Examples of her testimony before various committees in Congress can be found in the USTESTIMONY database.

Search: sp(giffords) (24 docs)

In the early hours of Friday December 17, 2010, the United States Congress passed the tax cut legislation called the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, to extend the expiring tax cuts. President Obama signed the legislation into law later that same day. The newly enacted legislation is available on Westlaw and can be found at PL 111-312.

The 3rd Circuit on Tuesday September 7th handed down a much anticipated decision  dealing with the Governments attempts to get cellular network positioning information  without a warrant (2010 WL 3465170).

The dispute stems from the Governments attempts to obtain cell site location information (CSLI)  regarding a particular subscriber under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C.A. §§ 2701 et seq.).

CSLI is information that cellular providers maintain regarding the location of their customers when they make a call.  Whenever a cellular customer makes a phone call, the cellular providers record what tower transmitted the call, as well as what “face” of the antenna was used to receive the call.

The police argue that this is valuable information for proving that individuals were at certain locations at particular times.  In this case, they requested the information under the Stored Communications Act provision that allows the Government to obtain the information by getting a court order merely upon a showing of the information’s relevance and materiality of the data to an ongoing criminal investigation.  This Act relieves the Government in certain situations of having to get a warrant and show probable cause.

In this case, the lower court refused to grant the order, and in a rare occurrence the order denying the request was joined by the other judges in the district.  The lower court held that the Stored Communication Act did not apply and that the CSLI records could only be obtained upon a showing of probable cause.

The 3rd Circuit here decided that the Stored Communications Act does not necessarily require that Probable Cause be shown in order to obtain this data.  Having decided that the lower court’s decision would not stand, much of the later decision dealt with the Government’s contention that if it met the requisite showing under the Stored Communications Act then the Magistrate must grant the order.  The 3rd Circuit did not agree, in addressing the legislative history they concluded that the magistrate might have discretion to require probable cause and a warrant under some circumstances.  The 3rd Circuit then remanded to the lower court for further consideration.

For more on the Stored Communications Act, see Chapter 9 of Data Security and Privacy Law: Combating Cyberthreats; specifically,  DATASPL § 9:17 et. seq.

The Reference Attorneys are still receiving a number of calls about the ECO-Gift Card Act, Public Law 111-209, the Amendment to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (“CCARD”).  This new Public Law strikes out Section 403 in Title IV of CCARD, found in Public Law 111-24, and replaces it with new language.  Procedurally, this Act works differently than what most attorneys who do legislative research are accustomed.

Unlike a number of laws that passed by Congress amending existing statutes, this Act amends the Public Law itself – not the codified statute.  The only statutory reference you will see about the ECO-Gift Card Act will be in the KeyCite History for 15 U.S.C.A. 1693L-1.  

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A frequent task Summer Associates have been faced with is trying to determine what precisely has happened with federal statutes over time.  On Westlaw we have the United States Code Annotated back through 1990 (USCAXX, XX= 2 digit year), but it is important to note that we also have United States Public Laws (US-PL) , and The United States Statutes at Large (STATLRG)back to the creation of the United States.  Many of the Acts in the Public Laws and Statutes at Large are not codified, of course.

The Statutes at Large can be interesting from a historical perspective as well. A couple of interesting acts I have run across include:

• Mary Todd Lincoln was granted the Franking Privilege –  14 Stat. 3  (the Franking Privilege entitles you to free postage). 
•  Original pay rates of Congress – 1 Stat. 70  were $6 per day, but only days that they attended!
• The President’s pay rate –  1 Stat 72 ( 25,000 which would be $628,000 in 2009 dollars using the Consumer Price Index Method). 
• As well as the first secret society incorporated by an Act of Congress in 1893 28 Stat. 96, the Knights of Pythias.

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There has been a flurry of  Congressional news this week with the enactment of the Financial Reform Bill, and the Senate passing the extension of jobless benefits.  When researching active or recently passed legislation it is important to understand which version you are interested in, either the engrossed, enrolled or introduced version, and how to access other versions.

In Westlaw, a find by citation for the Wall Street reform Bill 2009 CONG US HR 4173, will pull up all the versions as separate results.  When you are in any of these bills you can click on the Graphical Bills link on the left side of the screen.  To open up a map that not only shows all of the versions, but also links to legislative history organized by category.

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Congress passed this bill yesterday afternoon.  The Dodd-Frank “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” is not law yet, close, but not quite yet. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 11, 2009 and the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S. 3217) was passed by the U.S. Senate on May 20, 2010. The Congressional Conference Committee on Financial Regulatory Reform has reconciled the two bills and the final legislation has been named the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the “Act”) (H.R. CONF. REP. 111-517).  The House approved the Act on June 30th and the Senate voted and passed it on July 15.   The bill is now on its way to President Obama who is expected to sign the legislation into law soon.

The Dodd-Frank “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 will reform the regulation of the financial industry and will protect consumers and investors. The Act is over 2000 pages long and the news databases are a great place to get the gist of the new impending law. For example, try the following search:

Database: ALLNEWSPLUS Query: da(after 6/24/2010) & PR,CA,TI(FINAN! WALL-STREET /5 REFORM! REGULAT! STABILITY) & “WALL STREET REFORM AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT”

The full text of the House Conference Committee Report at 2010 WL 2671804: H.R. CONF. REP. 111-517

Update: On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the new legislation into law.

Enrolled version can be found at:  2009 CONG US HR 4173

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We have had several Summer Associates call regarding difficulty that they were having determining the history of the Regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations.  Specifically at issue in a few calls have been the new credit card regulations created under the Obama administration.  You can find news stories discussing those here. 

In looking at those regulations some Summer Associates have been confused by the source field into thinking that the regulations have been around for some time, instead of being newly enacted. 

If you run the following search by clicking this link: we get 18 results that are mostly some newly enacted credit card rules.  If you look at bottom of each, there is a Source field.  The Source and Credit fields at the bottom of CFR sections are similar fields with a very important distinction.  The Credit field lists Federal Register documents that have amended the section you are looking at.  The Source field lists Federal Register documents that have affected any section in the Part the section resides within. 

 If you look at the first result in the 17 we get from the query above, (12 CFR 226.51), the Source field is right after the text of the section.  The Source field reads:

SOURCE: Reg. Z, 46 FR 20892, Apr. 7, 1981; 52 FR 43181, Nov. 9, 1987; 54 FR 13864, April 6, 1989; 56 FR 13754, April 4, 1991; 58 FR 17084, April 1, 1993; 59 FR 40204, Aug. 5, 1994; 73 FR 44599, July 30, 2008; 74 FR 36094, July 22, 2009; 75 FR 7818, Feb. 22, 2010, unless otherwise noted.

It is telling us that the first Federal Register document that affects any section within Part 226 is from 1981.  Each of the other listed Federal Register documents affected the part or a section within it, but not necessarily this section.  This section is new and was created February 22nd 2010, as you can see by clicking the last Federal Register document cited in the Source field.

 An example of a section with both a Credit and a Source field can be found by going to the 15th result from our search (12 CFR 567.12).  The Credit and Source field read:

[59 FR 4788, Feb. 2, 1994; 60 FR 39232, Aug. 1, 1995; 62 FR 66264, Dec. 18, 1997; 62 FR 67117, Dec. 23, 1997; 63 FR 42678, Aug. 10, 1998; 66 FR 59666, Nov. 29, 2001; 73 FR 19, Jan. 2, 2008; 73 FR 79607, Dec. 30, 2008]

SOURCE: 54 FR 49649, Nov. 30, 1989; 57 FR 33439, July 29, 1992; 58 FR 4314, Jan. 14, 1993; 59 FR 4788, Feb. 2, 1994; 59 FR 18475, April 19, 1994; 60 FR 45621, Aug. 31, 1995; 60 FR 66715, Dec. 26, 1995; 61 FR 575, Jan. 8, 1996; 62 FR 55493, Oct. 24, 1997; 72 FR 69438, Dec. 7, 2007, unless otherwise noted.

For this section, the Credit field (the top paragraph) is listing the first Federal Register document that affects this section, and then every subsequent Federal Register document that affects this section.  The Source field is indicating every Federal Register document that affects any section in Part 567 .  In short, the credit field tells you about the section you are viewing, the Source field tells you about the Part the section is within.

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As you might imagine, we’ve handled several questions recently relating to the newly-enacted Arizona Immigration Legislation. A number of these involve obtaining the legislative history of the law. As mentioned in a previous post, one can obtain a list of legislative history on Westlaw by finding AZ LEGIS 113 (2010) by citation, then clicking the “Reports” link to the left of the document. Upon performing that action, however, one is confronted by a long list of documents, including news releases, fact sheets, amendments, etc.

How does one easily navigate this list to find relevant information, without having to read each of the 20+ documents in full? A search in the Arizona Legislative History database, that’s how!

Let’s say, for example, that you are asked to find legislative history relevant to the “willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document” piece of the legislation. We know that the legislation originated as Arizona Senate Bill 1070, and we know that we want the document to mention the willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document. Thus, we access the Arizona Legislative History (AZ-LH) database, and run the following Terms & Connectors search: “SENATE BILL” S.B. /3 1070 & “WILLFUL FAILURE.” The search returns 8 documents, and each mentions the terms we were looking for.

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As state legislatures are busy reviewing a myriad of legislation in the waning days of their legislative sessions, it may become difficult to find or track the legislation in which you are interested.  Many times as practitioners, unless we are true legislative analysts, our knowledge about a particular piece of proposed legislation rivets on the words in an article written by reporters walking the legislative beat. They determine how they can best convey the idea of a bill in “soundbite” wording that may never properly correspond to the wording in the legislation.

One clear example of this problem is the “Parental Liability Waiver bill” in Florida that was recently passed by the legislature and signed into law last week.  The impetus for the law is that the Florida Supreme Court two years ago invalidated such waivers because the state didn’t have a law allowing them. After much debate in the state, the legislature decided to pass a law allowing such waivers.  If you did not have the particular number of this bill (S.B. 2440), you would probably be searching this bill using terms like “Parental waiver” and “liability.”  If you did, you might very well get frustrated in your attempts to find the new law.  For you see, the law never mentions the term “parent.”  The bill discusses the “liability release signed by a natural guardian.”

To lessen the amount of frustration you may be experiencing in your electronic research, don’t forget your old friend, the Thesaurus.**  You can  turn to that book on your shelf that is gathering dust or turn to some type of on-line thesaurus or even click the Thesaurus link located next to  the Search box on Westlaw.

In a Thesaurus you will find terms like Mom, Mother, Dad, Father and Guardian that you can substitute for the term “parent.”  Think of this example the next time you are researching a point of law.  The most popular term for a concept is not the only term for a concept and you may need to broaden the terms you use to make your search more successful.

**WestlawNext leverages the power of WestSearch technology to automatically incorporate other terms commonly associated with your research query.   This post is primarily designed to assist current Westlaw.com users.